Instrument Families: Brass, Woodwind, Percussion, and Strings

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to touch, play, and hear a real trumpet or violin?

An Instrument Petting Zoo is a fun, hands-on experience where children can explore and try out different musical instruments up close. Instead of just listening to music, kids get to interact with the instruments, creating a personal and engaging experience that helps them connect with the sounds in a way that a traditional concert can’t provide.

During an Instrument Petting Zoo event, children can try out various instruments like the piano, violin, saxophone, trombone, and more, allowing them to feel the vibrations and understand how the instruments make music. It’s a perfect way to spark curiosity about different sounds and how they’re created.

Orchestral instruments are grouped into four families, each producing sound in a unique way. This interactive online orchestra lets you explore each family’s sound by clicking on the section you want to hear, giving you a deeper understanding of the variety of instruments and how they work together to create beautiful music.

Brass Instruments

Brass instruments naturally belong together because they’re all made of metal, like the trombone, tuba, sousaphone, trumpet, and French horn. However, what truly unites them is how they produce sound. Unlike other wind instruments, brass players buzz their lips into the mouthpiece, creating vibrations that can be adjusted to change pitch. The embouchure, or the way the mouth is positioned, involves tight corners and relaxed lips, which allows for a range of notes.

Brass instruments like the bugle produce notes through variations in the embouchure, while others, like the trumpet, add valves or slides to play all the notes of the chromatic scale. Though the saxophone is made of brass, it’s not part of the brass family since it doesn’t rely on buzzing to produce sound.

Today, some brass instruments are even made of plastic, like the pBone or pTrumpet, which are lightweight and durable but still classified as brass. Developing a good ear for pitch is crucial in playing brass, and musicianship programs like Let's Play Music help students build this skill. Here's a fabulous trumpet solo with some close-ups of the finger action to inspire youngsters who love brass:

Woodwinds

Woodwinds are aerophones (instruments that require air to play) and come in many shapes and sounds. Instruments like the bassoon, saxophone, piccolo, oboe, flute, and clarinet are all part of this family.

Though all woodwinds were originally made of wood, many are now made of metal or plastic. The saxophone, invented around 1840, is also part of the woodwind family due to its sound production, despite being made of brass. Woodwinds create sound through vibrations when air passes over a reed (or in the case of the flute, along the tube). The clarinet and saxophone use one reed, while the oboe and bassoon use two, while the flute and recorder rely on the air vibrating within the tube.

Strings

String instruments, or chordophones, produce sound by vibrating strings. Examples include the violin, viola, cello, bass, harp, and guitar. The strings are typically made of nylon, steel, or gut, and the hollow bodies of these instruments amplify the vibrations.

Strings are usually played with a bow made of wood and horsehair, but musicians can also pluck or tap the strings. The Piano Guys creatively explore unconventional sounds with the cello, such as using a bump on the body for a bass drum effect or rubbing rosin on the bow for a shaker sound. Their innovative approach offers a fun twist on string playing—check out their videos for more and our Piano Guys Interview too!

Percussion

Percussion instruments are either idiophones (which produce sound when hit) or membranophones (which vibrate through stretched skin). They can also make sound when shaken or scraped. Examples include bongos, bass drum, snare drum, xylophone, cymbals, tambourine, maracas, gong, chimes, and even the piano.

Did you catch that I added piano to the percussion family? The piano is often considered part of the percussion family because it produces sound when hammers strike its strings. This amazing brief animation shows the hammer action of the piano keys.

While it has vibrating strings like a string instrument, its primary action—striking with varying force—places it in the percussion category. Pitched percussion instruments like the piano, glockenspiel, and marimba can play specific notes, while instruments like timpani play a limited range. In fact, even clapping and finger-snapping are percussion! A child’s body is the perfect first percussion instrument, so we encourage tapping, patting, and dancing as a foundation for learning other instruments. Check out this video that takes hand-clapping and foot-stomping to an amazing level:

Timbre

Now you know about the four families of instruments, grouped by how they produce sound. Just like people from different places speak with their own accents, instruments have their own unique "voices" in music.

This is called timbre (pronounced tamber), which refers to the character or quality of a sound. For example, a banjo and a guitar can play the same tune, but their timbres are distinct. Timbre is often called tone color, as each instrument has its own "color" or sound. Composers use these colors to create contrast or blend sounds, like pairing a trumpet melody with string harmonies.

Timbre is key in evoking emotions or depicting ideas, as shown in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, where each character is represented by a different instrument: the cat is a clarinet, grandpa is a bassoon, the duck is an oboe, the bird is a flute, and the wolf is a French horn. Enjoy exploring the music!

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